Wild Woods

We decided to go for a long walk today. We cut through the woods at the end of our street, across the fields and through some of the forest on the farm, then onto a trail for a bit and finally found a nice spot by a stream to hang out for an hour or so. Here they are checking out the flowing water.
We explored a bit and stopped to look at lots of little things. Here's a cool tree root and then a Brendan pointing to a big birds' nest we spotted.


We stopped in at the Asian supermarket for some sort of container to keep our big lego in, Brendan and Tadhg liked all the fish tanks and the gaudy ceramic dogs with baskets and the like.
Here they are on the way home, sharing a box of raisins.

Shortly after that Brendan was walking a stretch of the trail when he decided to sit down and refused to move or get back in the buggy. I kept walking a bit to see if he'd follow. When he didn't and I was about 50 or 60 yards away I ducked into the woods and peeked through the tree branches to see what he'd do. He looked up and when he didn't see me he started crying and running towards us. I immediately jumped back out and felt awful guilt at making him think he'd been abandoned. A mean experiment :(
Anyway, as I got back to him two men appeared out of the trees (I think there was a workplace of some sort just through the trees). They asked if everything was alright and then said they had seen a BIG bear right here (with arms stretched right out wide) just last week and that there were coyotes here yesterday. Aahhhhhh. I had just heard on the radio the other day that a woman had been killed by coyotes on a trail in Cape Breton.
Well, it was another 6 or 8 hundred yards to the road so for the rest of that stretch I was visualising myself going all wild animal like myself and protecting my babies and fighting off hungry coyotes and swinging a stick at them and sticking my fingers in their eyes... The adrenaline was pumping just thinking about it. And I got a crook in the neck from looking into the woods the whole time.
As I imagined the end of the world, the two of them fell into a lovely peaceful sleep.

Oh so sweet.